


or someone that i used to be or someone that i will be

by stellerssong



Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Us (Movie 2019)
Genre: Animal Death, Crossover, Gen, Multi, Pre-Relationship, doppelgangers, i promise those ship and character tags make sense in context
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 20:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21259169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellerssong/pseuds/stellerssong
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a boy. And the boy had a shadow.





	or someone that i used to be or someone that i will be

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains spoilers for the main plot twist of the movie _Us_ (2019, dir. Jordan Peele), so proceed with caution if you've been saving that one for yourself. It further contains various worldbuilding snippets that range from semi-canonical to just completely, absolutely made up for the fun of it, but look, if you thought I was somehow gonna NOT worldbuild, I'm really not sure who you think I am.
> 
> For another perspective on certain events related herein, please read [some ghost of me that i dreamed up just to sing myself to sleep](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19828159) by the inimitable [the_everqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_everqueen/pseuds/the_everqueen).

_Deductive reasoning_ is what they’d always called it in the books he’d used to read. (He still remembers those stories and their words, their bright beautiful pictures and twisting plot lines you could get lost in for hours and days at a time, nothing like the short cruel staccato of _Restricted Area Keep Out_ or _Senior Research Staff Only_ or _Biohazard_.) If A Then B, If B Then C, Therefore If A Then C. There was a detective with a funny hat and an unusual name who found missing people and stolen items and solved crimes. It’s just like that, if you think about it hard enough, only he’s the detective now, the brilliant detective who will solve the crime and save the day.  
  
(He still remembers crimes: things that are wrong. Things that harm other people.)  
  
(Things that evoke punishment.)  
  
So, apply deductive reasoning:  
  
A: There is a voice that speaks to them over the PA system. Not a pleasant voice—an inflectionless, dull female one, robotic and distorted with the aging circuits. It never says anything particularly interesting, either. _This is a reminder that proper containment gear must be worn at all times in Sector 2-B_, sometimes, or _Will Dr. Hanover please report to Administration. Paging Dr. Hanover_. Occasionally there’s a wheezy emergency klaxon followed by _Attention all staff. Please proceed to designated evacuation routes_, the urgency in the message dulled past bluntness by time and signal degradation and familiarity.  
  
But it is, at least, a voice.  
  
B: The Tethered do not speak. The Tethered never speak. He’s inclined to believe that they can’t speak, after however many years he’s spent down here among the silent throngs of them. (It’s been years. It has to have been. He was a boy when he was locked away, and it’s been long enough that the face he sees in slivers of broken glass and the flat panes of one-way mirrors has shifted. He’s got a beard, now, and long hair, and on bad days he’ll catch his own reflection’s eye without thinking and then startle terribly, thinking he’s seen Dad, or Mom. So. Years.) The only other living things down here in the Underground are similarly voiceless, rabbits and rats and cockroaches, breeding in the dark corners of the abandoned laboratory and its network of tunnels, spinning out their little lives. And him, of course, but obviously the voice isn’t him. He’d know if it were. He thinks.  
  
C: (There is another world out there, up above the Underground, a world with sun and sky and plants and animals and people who aren’t silent shuffling zombies, and if he could just get out—if he could just find his way back _out_—)  
  
(He remembers world. He does. He does. He’s not crazy. He was born in world and he lived in world and he’ll be fucking damned if he dies down here without seeing it again.)  
  
Put all the pieces together. There’s a voice. The Tethered don’t speak. Therefore, it’s not coming from them.  
  
Therefore, it’s from outside.  
  
And following that, maybe, maybe—it’ll lead them out.  
  
Lead _them_, and not just _him_. Them in general, for the masses of Tethered trapped down here, living out their days in darkness, never knowing the light of the sun or the smell of fresh air. His heart aches for them, truly. Their lot is even sadder than his own, and when he leads them up out of hell, their inheritance will be the wide world they’ve been deprived.   
  
But also them specifically, because he isn’t alone.  
  
You’re never truly alone, down here in the Underground. The Tethered have the run of the place, walking their unfathomable circuits on errands of their own, and the complex isn’t so big that a crowd their size peters out any time soon. (Can’t be so big. Right? Oh, he hopes it can’t be.) He’s gathered a fair double handful of followers, too, who gather to listen to him speak, his arms flailing as though beating back the dark and the walls closing in. Lilith and Rameses, Cato and Marat, Lupa and Ford and Aquiline. Any one of them would follow him here if he told them to—although that’s not really a statement of worth, because the Tethered are very susceptible to suggestion, as he’s found out. He appreciates strength in numbers, to be sure, but for this mission he needs people who can think, who are capable of action.  
  
He needs his lieutenants.  
  
How does he know what to call them? Even he can’t quite explain the facts behind it. If he were to speak his best guess out loud, he’d laugh himself sick; it all sounds so absurd, something plucked straight from a bad horror movie. (He remembers movies, remembers horror movies, even, although it’s increasingly bizarre that he’d ever derived pleasure from the clenched-stomach cold-sweat feeling of fear. He’s lived through too much of it to ever think it amusing again.) But the truth of the matter is that he just…_knows_.   
  
Mind-reading, telepathy, seeing visions—some combination of those three, maybe. Although it’s not as comprehensive as the first or coherent as the second or grandiose as the third. Spend enough time among the Tethered and you find yourself just _knowing_ things, things you were never told, things you have no right to remember, seen through another person’s eyes. Things like the way through a particular warren of halls and tunnels, or a feeling well-hidden beneath a blank face.  
  
Things like names, although whether those names were assigned somehow or chosen or just grew organically out of each Tethered he’s never been able to figure out.  
  
So, then: some names of note.  
  
Agathos prowls along at his left. He moves in fits and starts, now stopping to stare at the flicker of an aging fluorescent bulb, now dashing ahead to pounce on a scurrying rat with a snarl and a flutter-flap of loose fabric. He keeps his jumpsuit peeled off his wiry chest, the sleeves knotted around his waist. The reason for this is made abundantly clear by the immediate fate of the unfortunate rat.  
  
They pause for a few minutes so Agathos can do what is needful with his quarry. It’s not a pretty sight, and before long it’s hard to tell Agathos’ freckles from the blood splattered on his face and dribbling down his chest. A sharp command brings him to heel for the time being, although he lets out a groan of discontent at being deprived of his fun.  
  
“I said _leave it be_, Agathos. We’ve got more important things to do.”  
  
Agathos makes a guttural noise in his throat as he rises to his feet, entrails dangling from between his fingers. There’s something of a threat in it, for all his speechlessness. He’s always been a willful follower. But follow he does, dropping back into formation at his leader’s side. He receives a careless touch on the head for that. _Good boy. Heel_. A tiny flicker of softness glints in Agathos’ long-lashed, hazel eyes, but it’s gone as soon as they move more than a step forward, into the next pool of sickly fluorescent light.  
  
The polar opposite to Agathos’ feral prowl, Livia ghosts along at the right, perfectly straight-backed, perfectly silent, always exactly one step behind. She betrays no reaction to Agathos’ little detour, even when he starts gnawing at the scraps he’s brought along. She’s always like that, her round girlish face calm and demure under her fuzz of close-cropped hair. If you didn’t know better, you’d think she was just a handmaiden, balancing the scales that Agathos tips with his reckless and frequently howling fury.  
  
Everyone here knows better. They know about the scalpel hidden up her sleeve, picked up from god knows where and wielded with deadly precision. They’ve seen the way she smiles when she kills. And kill she does; just because the underground is silent doesn’t mean it’s devoid of danger.  
  
_He_ has no use for soppy handmaidens, or for a tool that can’t also be a weapon. You adapt down here, you learn to play by the rules of the moment, or you die. As he’s learned in his time.  
  
And he himself?  
  
His name is—  
  
Well, he calls himself Cicero.  
  
(He remembers another name, from when he was young and ran under the light of the sun and had _family_ and _brother _and _father _and _mother_. That name’s been taken from him. He was stupid and he was weak and pathetic and slow, so he lost it. It only makes sense. But he intends to win it back.)  
  
(He bares his teeth in something you could call a smile. Yes, Cicero has learned to play by ever-shifting rules, he’s learned to be sharp and quick and merciless, he’s learned to keep his guard up and fend for himself. He’s cultivated all that with blood and sweat and tears. These days, he’d call himself more than a match for anyone who’d care to challenge him. Or anyone he’d care to challenge.)  
  
Cicero stumbles a little, then; Livia’s caught him by the arm, stopping him in his tracks. He shakes off her restraining hand. “What?” he rasps.  
  
Silently as ever, Livia gestures ahead of them. It’s a good thing she can’t talk, because if she could, she’d probably make some snide comment about how Cicero had been about to lead them face-first into a wall. Even so, he doesn’t appreciate even the ghost of a joke at his expense.  
  
“Yeah, yeah, I see it. I have eyes.” Cicero steps forward hastily to examine the markers on the wall. His eyes have gotten worse since he’s been trapped down here—insult to injury, he’s deprived even of something as simple as prescription lenses. (He remembers glasses. Duh. He’s not stupid.) Once he’s close enough to the signage, though, it takes him no time at all to zero in on what he needs.  
  
←_ Sector 1-A—120–101_  
  
“This way.”  
  
They pick up the pace, Cicero nearly running as he counts doors, right and left, right and left. _120\. 119. 118A _and _118B_. This isn’t the first time he’s hunted down an administrative office, or the first time he’s done it with companions. _115\. 114. _Long stretch of hallway, then _113_. But the bastards who made this place and then abandoned it down in the dark were careful to wipe most of their records, or carry things out with them. Surely, Cicero thinks with a sneer, they didn’t think the Tethered were _people_, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to lock them away like this. But they clearly had an idea that the creatures they were dealing with could think. Mustn’t risk giving the monsters a key to the cage, now, must we?  
  
But then, if they were utterly bent on destruction, why not raze the entire compound and salt the earth on their way out? A few more logical leaps has led Cicero to this theory—they must not have known they’d be leaving this place for good. And it’d be foolish, utterly foolish, if they intended to come back and rebuild their entire operation from scratch some day in the indistinct future. So the records must still be here, somewhere, plans and blueprints and everything needed to know this place bottom to top. And what better place to keep your master records than in the master office, first of the first?  
  
“Here,” he says, halting in front of an otherwise nondescript door. _101_. Agathos and Livia wait while he tries the handle. Many of the doors down here have been left hanging open, or at the very least unlocked, for the Tethered to wander in and out of as they will, but not this one. He rattles the handle once, twice, three times before noticing the black box mounted on the wall beside the door frame. They’ve seen things like this before, but this one has a blinking red light shining from its face. Some sort of scanner, maybe, an electronic lock, and them without the proper key.  
  
They’re not sunk yet, though. “Agathos,” Cicero commands, backing away. He jerks his chin at the door. “Break it down.”  
  
Agathos makes a kind of rasping wheeze of assent, trots across the hall. Cicero drifts closer to Livia and clutches at her slim wrist. Squeezes. Livia doesn’t flinch, doesn’t gasp, doesn’t move a muscle. That’s why Cicero likes her; she’s not afraid. She knows who she follows and who she’s sworn her wordless loyalty to. “Almost in,” Cicero breathes. Not to Livia, just to the wall, to the door, to everything beyond. “Almost there, and then we’ll be out.”  
  
Livia’s chin dips a fraction of an inch. _Whatever you say._  
  
“It has to work. It _will_ work. There’s no way it—it’s got to, it’s got to.”  
  
He’s babbling now. This was always something he used to have a problem with, he thinks, but down here where he’s the only thing that both speaks and draws breath it sometimes takes hold of him and won’t let go until it’s run its course. Too many thoughts, not enough stimulation, so he has to speak them aloud and let them shape themselves or go completely, utterly mad. He’s avoided the latter thus far. He thinks he has, anyway.  
  
“It’s all gotta be there, we’ll find it all, we will, and if we don’t you and Agathos can just kill me,” he goes on, ignoring the scraping noises from behind them of a heavy piece of furniture being dragged across the floor. “I know he wants to, you can see it in his eyes sometimes, can’t you? He looks at me like I’m a piece of meat. No, no. Like I’m one of the rabbits. Or the rats. Something still running that won’t be running for much longer.” He lets out a wheeze of laughter. “Maybe I should say, _you can try to kill me_. Never quite managed the knack of dying. No matter how hard I try, I can’t ever seem to get there. Having someone to help me might do the trick. A couple of someones.”  
  
Livia doesn’t reply. Of course she doesn’t. But she does work her wrist free of his grip just enough so she can squeeze his nerveless hand. Cicero snorts.  
  
“You always know just what to say.”  
  
Another squeeze.  
  
“I know, I know. I don’t deserve you.”  
  
Something flickers over Livia’s face—a sneer? A smile?—but before Cicero can respond to it Agathos shuffles past, dragging a heavy metal bench that, from the looks of it, was formerly bolted to the floor. He makes a noise at Cicero, who changes gears immediately, the manic flash coming back into his eyes.  
  
“Yeah, yes, that’s perfect. Move, Livia.”  
  
The two of them back away as Agathos grunts, muscles straining, and hefts the bench so it’s balanced on his shoulder. It teeter-totters slightly, but he plants his feet and steadies it. He shuffles forward a few steps so he’s within arm’s reach of the door.  
  
Cicero feels lightheaded, like all the air in the hall has been replaced with soda fizz. (He remembers soda. God, some days he knows he’d kill to taste something that sweet again.) “Yes, yes, yes,” he chants, not bothering to lower his voice to an undertone. “Yes, that’s it, do it, do it now—”  
  
Agathos shifts his grip, angles the bench on his shoulder, and in one swift motion brings the edge down hard against the doorknob. A resounding _clang_ echoes around the hall, and Livia flinches hard, her nostrils flaring and her eyes going wide. Cicero’s eyes widen too, but not with fear. “_Yes_,” he snarls. “Again. _Again._”  
  
_Clang_. This strike glances off the knob at an angle; for a moment bright sparks scatter to the floor. Cicero pulls away from Livia. “Again, again, come on. Come on. Harder.”  
  
_Clang. Clang_. Wind up, strike, recover. Agathos works his way into a slow rhythm that runs an uneven counterpoint to the gallop of Cicero’s racing thoughts. He wasn’t just running his mouth to Livia before—what if this is another dead end? _Clang. _What if the only thing behind that locked door is another empty room, just like all the other empty rooms he’s found before, with Agathos and Livia and without them? What if he’s led them straight into a blank wall? _Clang. _The Tethered will tolerate a lot, but even they won’t follow him forever when he has nothing to his name but failures, and at some point they’ll catch wise and leave him alone in the dark again. Alone, alone, and then his mind will turn and devour itself from the tail up, and he’ll be less than a failure, less than nothing—  
  
_Clang—clatter._  
  
The hall echoes with Agathos’ howl of triumph and the crash of the bench as he hurls it to the floor. He’s barely had time to savor his victory, though, before Cicero is shoving him to one side in his mad dash forward. “Move, move, move,” Cicero barks, scrabbling at the twisted remains of the doorknob. The door sticks for a moment, rattles under Cicero’s onslaught, and then, finally, some shard of metal gives way. Without waiting for the others, Cicero stumbles through into the room beyond.  
  
“Yes,” he breathes. “Yes, oh, yes.”  
  
His feet stir up clouds of dust as he rushes forward to lay hands on the great console stretched across the far wall. It lies beneath a bank of TV monitors; some of the screens are dead and black, some are fuzzed with static, but most of them show, in stuttery black-and-white glory, the halls and rooms of the Underground, populated by roaming Tethered. “Yes, yes, yes, oh, God, there you are, there you are,” Cicero gasps. His gaze darts between the screens and the array of buttons and faders under his fingers. He was never what you would call _technologically adept_, but he remembers reading, God, of course he does, and the legend _Broadcast_ displayed prominently under a large white button placed near the stalk of a microphone is easy enough to parse.  
  
He’s got plans for that already.  
  
He scans over the board, looking for more clues. Blinking orange light from another button labeled EMERG. _Emergency_, yes, but what does it mean, what does it signify—? He startles, then, because a squawk of noise has come from overhead. It takes a moment to identify, he’s never heard it from this close, but through the static and distortion he can pick out a few familiar syllables.   
  
_—Dr. Hano—to Administr—_  
  
Click click click, the pieces come together. EMERG means _emergency_ which necessitates an _emergency broadcast_ to Dr. Hanover, whoever that is, asking him to come to Administration, which is here, the heart and center of things. Testing his hypothesis, he reaches out tentatively and taps the EMERG button. The blinking light clicks off, and the voice from the loudspeaker fizzles into silence.  
  
Cicero allows himself the length of one breath to just stand there and tremble with unfettered glee. Oh, it feels good to be right.  
  
Only one breath, though, because now he’s energized, his fingertips fairly crackling with electricity as they flicker over the console, his eyes fever-bright as hitherto impossible plans spring to life inside his head. “Livia, look around,” he orders, “see if you can find any kind of map of the place, plans, blueprints, anything. You know what a map is, right? Livia?” Agathos wheezes in concern, and Cicero turns around to find that Livia hasn’t followed them into the room. He leans away from the console to check on her.  
  
“Oh, for Christ’s—we don’t have _time_ for this!”  
  
Livia’s come to a halt in the doorway of the room, eyes blank and staring at something he can’t see. Her hands come up, pat at empty air, move to embrace an invisible person. A flicker at the corner of her mouth—and then she’s shaping silent words, her brows knitting with an uncharacteristically warm expression of concern.  
  
God damn it. She’s _mirroring_.  
  
“Livia. Livia, snap out of it, fucking stop, we can’t do this now,” Cicero barks, striding back over to her and shaking her by the shoulder. “_Listen_ to me. You can go to outer space later—” (he remembers outer space as a concept, but it always feels surreal when he’s grown used to the suffocating maze of halls and rooms, all enclosed, all self-contained) “—but now I _need_ you. I’m right here, look at me, dammit!”  
  
He shakes her harder, enough to rattle her teeth, but it’s no use—she’s fallen hard and fast into her double’s mind, and nothing Cicero or Agathos or anyone in the Underground can do will pull her out of it before it relinquishes her. Somewhere out in world, her double speaks, dragging Livia along with her. Cicero reads a few words on her lips: _—need to tell us when—if we don’t know what you’re feeling how can we—_  
  
“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t _matter_, just don’t look at her right now, look at ME.” He hears Agathos straighten up behind him, and his heart drops into his stomach. “No, no, no, not you too, Agathos, please, not you too—” he pleads. The mirroring is catching, but if he can jar Agathos back to reality quick enough he can get them back on track, he thinks…  
  
A gentle touch on his shoulder, and no, no, it’s too late. Agathos would never. He pulls away, staggers backward, watches Agathos and Livia turn their faces to him, unseeing eyes and unfamiliar, gentle expressions. Agathos mouths something, _I know I’m_ and _but we want_ and _please, Alex_.  
  
Please, Alex.  
  
An iron fist grips Cicero’s throat. He remembers—no. No. No, no, no. That’s just coincidence. It’s a common name, common as dirt, common as dust. Agathos—the other Agathos—the one who holds the end of Agathos’ tether, somewhere out in space and time—he could be speaking to anyone, anyone at all. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. It _doesn’t_.  
  
Distantly, Cicero feels his own fingers twist in his hair, pull and pull and pull until the shock of it jangles him back into the here and now. Besides, he tells himself, besides, besides, he is _not_ common, he is _not_ doomed to obscurity and a silent drawn-out death down here in the darkness. His name is—it _was_—no, no, he is Cicero now, he is, and he’d better forget whatever other name he’d answered to until he can prove he deserves it, until he can earn it, until he can rip it out of the hands of the _thing_ that stole his life—  
  
He doesn’t realize how far he’s moved until the console jars against the small of his back. He jerks away with a mewling little cry that he’s immediately ashamed of, even though Agathos and Livia are far beyond hearing it. Sharp tug on his hair again. Focus, _focus_, you pathetic brat. You’re here to do something, so do it. You were always alone before, and that never stopped you, did it? You should’ve known even Agathos and Livia would fall away in the end. Everyone does. They always do.  
  
So don’t fall apart, when this is just a variation on a theme. Stand up. Keep going. Take your shot.  
  
What makes you different, Cicero? What makes you more than just another crawling ant?  
  
Words.  
  
_So use them_.  
  
Cicero turns his back on Agathos and Livia and their mindless dumb show. Gently, almost shyly, his fingers trace over the microphone mounted on the console, down its stem, down to the _Broadcast_ button.  
  
(If he could see behind him, he’d notice: Agathos and Livia, phantom confusion and anguish on their faces, reaching for him, reaching. _Alex_, they both mouth, their hearts clenching as they try to batter down a wall that isn’t theirs to break—)  
  
He presses the button.  
  
“Tethered,” he whispers into the microphone. Flickers on the many television screens; Tethered halting in the middle of their circuits or hunts or explorations, looking around the rooms and halls for the source of the sound. Their confusion is near-tangible. _New sound? New voice? Who speaks? Who, who?_  
  
“Tethered,” he repeats. His voice rises, the cracks and rough patches in it healing themselves, hardening over with something bright and brass and shining. “Has anyone ever called you that before? Out loud? How many of you were alive and walking when they abandoned this place? How many of you died here, down here in the darkness, without ever getting the chance to see the outside? How many—”  
  
_Slow down, slow down, mijo_, murmurs a voice in his head. _Breathe, just breathe._  
  
(He remembers a gentle, callused hand smoothing his hair, wiping the tears off his cheeks; he remembers dark brown curls and a smile like the sun and a warm understanding waiting for him to wrestle his thoughts into order.)  
  
He begins again. “Tethered. You’ve all lived hard lives. Always hungry, always cold, always afraid. Killing to survive. Controlled by forces you don’t understand, by people you’ve never met. Bound to wait and obey and stay silent.” He pauses, willing his heart to stop galloping in his chest. _Come on, come on, just say it_. If they’re going to follow him, if they’re going to trust him, they need to hear…“I know. I am one of yours. One among your number.”  
  
No cries of outrage from the halls or speakers, no expressions of mutinous rejection on the faces onscreen. The Tethered, alone or gathered in defensive little knots or crowded together, are rapt, their faces upturned, their eyes focused, staring into space as though they’ve all been caught by their tethers and made to mirror.  
  
They’re not mirroring, though. They’re listening. Listening to _him_.  
  
“What if I told you,” Cicero goes on, “there was another way to live? You know there is. You’ve seen it, behind your eyelids, like a waking dream. You’ve been forced to tread the measures of it.” He _tsks_, lets a note of sympathy crawl into his voice. “It would have been kinder if the ones who put you here hadn’t built a window into your cell.”  
  
A few mouths twitch on the monitors, a few pairs of eyes glance down and then up again. The Tethered might be biddable, but they’re not wholly insensate; if they were, this whole venture would have been stillborn. And he’s hooked them, they hear him, now just to reel them in…  
  
“What I’m thinking is…_we break the window_.”  
  
He holds his breath. Is that too abstract for them, too high-flying, too—?  
  
And then he exhales, a long shaking breath of disbelief. Because all around, on the screens, in halls and rooms and labs throughout the Underground, right behind him in this very office, a tremor has gone through the Tethered. A single great yearning pulse. Mute they might be, dull-eyed and pliable and imprisoned, but thank god, thank god, Cicero’s gamble has paid off.  
  
They know where they are. They know what they lack. And they _want_.  
  
“Just think,” he whispers, half to himself, half to his rapt audience. “Just think, there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t know we exist. Millions and billions of people jerking us around like puppets on a string, for no reason other than _because they can_. We’ve been down here the whole time. We haven’t been hiding. And they never came for us. They never even thought to look under the bed and see what was there. And worse, even worse than that, the ones who knew _abandoned_ us. Left us down here, in the dark, in the cold, eating filth and being dragged around by the hair, seeing what we could have and never being able to have it. They’re monsters, they’re worse than monsters. At least a monster can’t help itself.  
  
“No, they’re criminals. They’ve committed crimes against us. They’ve stolen everything there is to have, down to our lives, and the only reason they didn’t finish the job and exterminate us is because they thought we were broken enough to never fight back. Crimes deserve punishment. You know that, don’t you? And who better to carry out the punishment than the ones wronged?” He spreads his arms wide, magnanimous, inviting an argument he knows will never come. “Who better to enact justice than us? Don’t we deserve that? Don’t we deserve to take back what was taken from us? Claim our promised land?”  
  
Silence after that, broken by a quiet noise from behind Cicero. A soft, wordless vocalization, repeated, low and rhythmic. Cicero looks over his shoulder at Agathos—and Agathos looks back at him, not into the void or through someone else’s eyes, but really at him. Cicero stares, and Agathos continues to chant, and then Livia joins in, and then, then, with a reverberation that shakes the very foundations of the underground…  
  
Cicero remembers tears, remembers weeping. If he could weep, he would now, but it’s been years since he’s cried, his tears have gone all to salt and dust by now.   
  
So he just stands there, for one minute, then two, listening to the darkness ring with the sound of the Tethered and their wordless chant. The air shimmers like a struck gong with the force of all those minds aligned to his vision. And even if he were as senseless to the psychic atmosphere as a rock, he’d have the images on screen: flickering, juddery, black-and-white, crowds of Tethered pouring into frame, arms upraised, mouths wide as they cry out to him, eyes alight with a fire you never see down here.  
  
Not just a rabble screaming for revolution, this. No, no, this is his army.  
  
He leans back toward the microphone.  
  
“If,” he breathes, and the multitudes fall silent, hanging once more on his every word, “if you’ll come with me—let me lead you to our glorious vengeance—then I promise you, once the last double is dead, once we’ve waded through their blood and wrung every last bit of life out of their pathetic bodies…then, then, we’ll have a whole world waiting for us. A world with sun and moon and wind and sky and everything. Our world. Our very own world. Can you imagine it?”  
  
Behind him, Livia sighs. Behind him, Agathos sighs. Behind him, before him, all around him, the Tethered sigh with longing. It sounds like wind in the leaves. Cicero remembers wind in the leaves.  
  
Perhaps he’ll get to hear that sound again.  
  
Fighting down the lump in his throat, he presses the button once more to sign off. “If you want to join us, come to room 101 in sector 1-A. The door will be open. We’ll be waiting. Don’t throw away your shot.”  
  
He doesn’t wait for any response, this time. There are shouts of approval from the halls, wordless howls, Tethered scrambling in whatever direction they think will carry them to their savior—but Cicero hears none of it. He turns away from the bank of monitors, his brain already skipping ahead, lightfoot, spinning hypotheticals and contingency plans to squirrel away in case of emergency. It’s just how it used to be, before, Above. No time to rest on your laurels, no time to take a break; the next hurdle is always just on the horizon, and then the next one, and then the next.  
  
“First things first, we need a map of this place. If the Tethered find us and we don’t have an out, they’ll tear us limb from limb.” There’s no fear in his voice as he says this, just a sort of detached understanding. Even on the brink of his greatest victory, he’s stood close enough to death to remember that it’s always lurking just around the corner, always waiting for him to slip up. “Livia, go through the filing cabinets over there. I’ll check around the console. Agathos, wait by the door. If anyone comes, keep them out until we signal you. We should have a few minutes, at least.”  
  
Agathos growls assent and parks himself in the doorway, his eyes slitted and mean as a feral cat’s. He can take two or three assailants, maybe hold off four for a while, but if they get rushed, and there’s no map—no, it won’t come to that, Cicero tells himself as he flips through abandoned files and crumbling typewritten pages. This isn’t the wild-eyed panic of earlier, though he’s not strictly speaking calm either; he’s just intent, focused, watching the path ahead illuminate itself. Agathos will be fine, the great ugly brute. He’ll make it above with them. All of them.  
  
Every nerve in Cicero’s body is on such high alert that even through the hundred different thoughts in his head, he hears Livia’s sharp little exhalation of triumph. He tosses aside his handful of files at once and hurries over.  
  
“What is it, what is it, what did you find—?”  
  
Livia holds up a thick sheaf of papers. The ghost of a smile hovers about her lips. Outsize sheets, grid marks, a maze of halls and rooms—and every page labeled neatly in the top corner. _Special Facilities: Clinical Research (Project Tether)_.  
  
“Livia,” Cicero says, “I could fucking kiss you right now.”  
  
Livia raises her dark brows a fraction of an inch at that—but, again, Cicero’s already past it. He snatches the blueprints out of her hands and drops to his knees so he can spread them out on the floor. Levels upon levels upon levels there. The numbers count up as the floors go down, and this place is bigger than he’d imagined, deeper, more sprawling: a labyrinth greater than any other, built to hold a city of monsters. It’s a miracle he ever managed to make it to 1-A.   
  
It’s a miracle the other one found its way out.  
  
He remembers, oh, yes. He does remember.  
  
(He remembers it started in a hospital. In retrospect, what better hiding place for what might be history’s greatest case of medical experimentation than a hospital? Who’d notice another white coat or set of scrubs among all the other doctors and nurses, or pay any mind to another body in the morgue?)  
  
(He remembers, vaguely, faintly, the illness. Not the details, no, but he remembers the sick, sour taste in his mouth, the blurriness of heat-haze, the dull ache in every limb. He remembers Mom taking care of him, and then suddenly, abruptly, not being there.)  
  
(He doesn’t remember coming to the hospital, doesn’t know whether it was in a car or an ambulance with sirens wailing, or if somehow Mom had managed to struggle onto a bus with him. The hospital is only bits and pieces, but they’re there: a pale green wall, a constant beep-beep-beep of whatever was monitoring him, a needle-jab in the arm, a woman telling him _she’s not far, she’s right in the next room, you can see her when you’re both well again_.)  
  
(And he remembers waking with a pair of hands tight around his throat.)  
  
(And he remembers trying to scream for Mom, but not having enough air for it. No words, just the gurgle of a dying animal, and then the dark.)  
  
(And he remembers waking in a dank, mildew-smelling room, one arm handcuffed to the bed he was lying on, and even through the fever he’d known it wasn’t right, he wasn’t meant to be there, something bad had happened—)  
  
(He remembers seeing his own face staring back at him. His own face, pale and thin, deep purple shadows like bruises under the eyes.)  
  
(And those eyes, the way they’d looked at him…)  
  
(And he remembers it leaving him down there, alone in the dark. No explanation, no attempts to justify, nothing. Just a pair of handcuffs and a mildew-smelling mattress and the darkness and him, left alone to die.)  
  
He didn’t die, though. Couldn’t. Not with that memory hanging over him, not while knowing that somewhere up there, a liar and a thief and a _fake_ is walking under the sun, wearing his name, living his life as he ought to have had it. Because it is still living, has to be; the tether between them may have been frayed when they switched places, but it hasn’t been cut. Cicero knows his double lives, with the strange unremarkable certainty of any sort of communication with the Tethered. It lives.  
  
For now.  
  
Livia grunts at him, a sort of warning, and Cicero blinks. He’s crumpled a page of the blueprints in one shaking hand. He flattens it out again, quite aware of Livia’s keen stare burning a hole in him, and of Agathos’ flat incurious gaze from the doorway. Deep breaths. Don’t think about what’s past. Stay in the moment. Keep moving. Stillness is lying flat on your back on a moldy cot in the dark, waiting for death to get you.   
  
“We’ve got the floor plans,” he says, just to break the silence. “Finding the exit will be easy. And if the main exit’s cut off, there have got to be emergency ones, bolt-holes in case this whole experiment went belly-up and they needed to get out quick.” He shuffles pages until he’s got hold of Level 1, jabs his finger at the office they’re in, traces zigzagging patterns to possible exits. His well-trained mind memorizes automatically: first right, then second left, then second left again, then straight through… They might need passcodes to get through the doors. Or they might not, they might be able to brute-force their way through.  
  
But once they’re through, there’s no need for plans. Cicero knows what to do.  
  
After all, he remembers punishment. He remembers a creature with his own face leaving him to die.  
  
He’s imagined its death so often, it feels more like a memory. Maybe it sees him coming, maybe not, but either way: its time is up. His face will be the last face it ever sees.  
  
And once it’s dead, his name will be Alexander Hamilton again.  
  
He smiles. A tiny flicker of motion, but Livia and Agathos both stir uneasily, draw away from him ever so slightly. The two of them might be more adept in the ways of murder, but right now, he’s the most dangerous person in the room.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from ["I Don't Know"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkSTAFNiUkw) from Dave Malloy's _Ghost Quartet_.
> 
> Comment if you, too, are passionate about the image of Phillipa Soo with a buzz cut.


End file.
